I’m scared that was the last Christmas we celebrated with a church service. The High Court ruled last week that Sunday is not a core part of a Christian’s belief; next, they’ll decide that Christmas is not, either. Mr Justice Langstaff has decided that a Baptist who works in a care home can be forced by her employers to work through Sunday too. This, even though her colleagues were happy to take Celestina Mba’s Sunday shift so she could do what all devout Christians do on a Sunday – go to church.

It didn’t matter that no one was complaining about Celestina Mba’s Sunday observance; her employers, Labour-led Merton Council, wanted her to drop her religious obligations. They’d decide what she was to do on the Sabbath day – not some dusty Bible. God? Who’s He? The Fourth Commandment? What’s that?

Christians like Celestina Mba had better take note: they live in an environment so hostile to Christians that any show of allegiance to this religion will get them into trouble. Don’t wear crucifixes, don’t pray for a patient, don’t try to foster a child: practising Christians are now barred from any of these activities. This, even though the majority of Britons still count themselves as Christians.

The clash of Christians and a newly strident secular establishment has become an everyday story: a cultural civil war that constantly claims Christian victims. Lawyers, and judges like Mr Justice Langstaff, have shown themselves, again and again, to stand on the side of the secularists. I still smart at the memory of the Law Society refusing to host a conference on the virtues of heterosexual marriage. Incredibly, this kind of censorship is allowed to go on under a Tory PM who himself claims allegiance to the majority Church.

In the UK, it seems like a common practice to use “lawfare” in order to coerce behavior. They use the nuclear option against individual Christians and conservatives in order to send a message to all. The message is that the government has a right to silence anyone who makes the secular left feel “offended”. The state is telling Christians and conservatives that it’s easier to go along with secularism and socialism just to get by. Even if you win your case, you will have to pay and pay legal costs to win it. Don’t try to be a hero, because if you do, we will get you.

You can even see this being done when law-abiding citizens defend themselves and get prosecuted for it. The message then is similar – don’t scare or offend criminals by deterring them with weapons.

But what about that 99%? What responsibility do they bear for the situation the world finds itself in? The answer is: plenty. Greed doesn’t just live on Wall Street: it finds a home on Main Street too. And when people think it’s perfectly OK to take out mortgages they can’t afford, or rack up credit card debt to buy flat screen TVs, clothes and appliances, or draw on their home’s equity to finance cars and vacations, well, as they say, you reap what you sow.

[…]But you only have to crack open the business pages, or watch a reality TV show like Gail Vaz-Oxlade’s “Princesses” (about heavily indebted young women) to start questioning the moral purity of the 99%. Many of these people are the authors of their own misery: they consider credit to be cheap, if not free, money. The result is that even here in Canada, the ratio of household debt to personal income has hit a whopping 150%, up 78% in real terms in the past twenty years.

I have no pity for those heavily indebted people, in part because I was once one of them. My love affair with credit started in university. While the limit on that first card was low – $1500 – it allowed a student with a part-time job to buy things she couldn’t otherwise afford (and mostly didn’t need). After getting married, I kept spending, even cashing in my meagre RRSP to help finance the wedding. Post-divorce, I racked up consumer debt, over $15,000 at its peak, at which point I took a harsh look at myself and said: enough. At the time, I was selling my condo: I took the proceeds, paid off the debt, invested the balance, and vowed to both save and pay monthly bills in full, promises I have kept ever since.

Luckily, I got religion well before the meltdown of 2008. But many people didn’t. And this makes them responsible not only for their own problems, but those of their neighbours.

Sure, it’s easy to blame the Wall Street CEOs for bundling rotten mortgages and contriving arcane debt instruments that weren’t worth the paper they were written on. But someone took out those mortgages. Millions of people, actually, who bought more house than they could afford. Did someone hold a gun to their head? No. They were just as greedy as the 1%, only on a smaller scale.

Governments are also just as guilty. In the U.S., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac granted mortgages to people deemed disadvantaged – minorities, the poor – in the hopes of increasing home ownership. This spurred the private sector to compete and fuelled the infamous subprime mortgage market.

The Canadians have special tax-free savings accounts that encourage them to save money instead of spending it. That’s something that we should do – provide people with tax-free savings accounts. Give people the incentive to save their money instead of spending it.

A justice of the peace has ordered the release of a woman arrested in connection with the shooting death of her husband because no charges have been filed.

Las Vegas police arrested Ericka McElroy on Oct. 7 outside her southwest Las Vegas home. Her 37-year-old husband, Shane McElroy, died after being shot in the chest. Police said the two had allegedly been in a domestic dispute.

A 20-year-old Valparaiso woman has pleaded guilty to falsely reporting that a Valparaiso man raped her, county police said Thursday.

Erica Donohue was sentenced to 180 days in jail, although most were suspended. She is to serve 20 days in jail and 10 days of community service.

Donohue said that on July 15, an acquaintance raped her in a rural area.

Porter County Detective Gene Hopkins investigated the case, and the evidence he gathered — including a video of the consensual act — convinced prosecutors to issue a warrant for Donohue, who was arrested Sept. 29.

She eventually admitted to making up the story about the rape, to hide where she had been from a person with whom she was in a relationship.

Sitting on a makeshift stand before the court, Nantz grew teary as he testified, blaming the marriage’s demise on his wife’s lavish spending habits, as well as what he claimed was a lack of support for his career, the paper reported.

Nantz’s wife, who is seeking alimony as well as more than $1.5 million-per-year in child support for the couple’s 15-year-old daughter, Caroline, has stated that she wants to keep the family’s six bedroom home in Westport, Conn. The family also owns a condominium at a ski resort in Utah, according to the Connecticut Post. Lorrie Nantz said that she wants to care for the child’s daughter even though she has a full-time nanny.

While court papers merely say that the marriage broke down irretrievably, Nantz told Superior Court Judge Howard Owens that while he was traveling around the country for work, his wife stayed home and went on excessive shopping sprees, the paper reported.

In nine years, Lorrie Nantz spent close to $1 million at a high-end clothing and jewelry store in Westport, Conn., the Post reported.

Last month she bought a $12,000 necklace at the posh store, but when pressed on its description, she could not remember details.

These stories are actually not uncommon. They are all from the last few days, and there are more stories like them every day. The lesson I am taking away from this is that the law is very hostile to men. It’s something that men don’t really talk about in public, and I wonder why that is the case.